Making better decisions typically requires obtaining information relevant to that decision. Adolescence is marked by increasing agency in decision-making and an accompanying increase in impulsive decisions, suggesting that one characteristic of adolescent decision-making is a tendency to make less-informed decisions. Adolescents could also be…

Human adults have a strong bias to invoke intentional agents in their intuitive explanations of ordered wholes or regular compositions in the world. Less is known about the ontogenetic origin of this bias. In 4 experiments, we found that 9-to 10-month-old infants expected a human hand, but not a mechanical tool with similar affordances, to be the…

How do people make rich inferences from such sparse data? Recent research has explored this inferential ability by investigating probabilistic reasoning in infancy. For example, 8- and 11-month-old infants can make inferences from samples to populations and vice versa (Denison & Xu, 2010a; Xu & Denison, 2009; Xu & Garcia, 2008a). The…

The present meta-analysis integrates research from 1,435 studies on associations of parenting dimensions and styles with externalizing symptoms in children and adolescents. Parental warmth, behavioral control, autonomy granting, and an authoritative parenting style showed very small to small negative concurrent and longitudinal associations with…

Two studies investigated the "overpowering hypothesis" as a possible explanation for the currently inconclusive empirical picture on age differences in affective responding to unpleasant events. The overpowering hypothesis predicts that age differences in affective responding are particularly evident in highly resource-demanding situations that…

This study used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a multilevel, longitudinal study of children sampled from 80 diverse neighborhoods, to explore associations among changes in neighborhood poverty from 1990 to 2000 and changes in youth's internalizing problems and property and violent offenses over 6 years (N =…

Longitudinal research has demonstrated a link between exposure to sexual content in media and subsequent changes in adolescent sexual behavior, including initiation of intercourse and various noncoital sexual activities. Based on a reanalysis of one of the data sets involved, Steinberg and Monahan (2011) have challenged these findings. However,…

Multiple methods are vital to understanding development as a dynamic, transactional process. This article focuses on the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methodologies can be combined to enrich developmental science and the study of human development, focusing on the practical questions of "when" and "how." Research situations that may…

A cross-sectional, stratified random sample of 1,891 male and female adolescents (age range from 12 years 6 months to 17 years 6 months) was tested in 1970 with the Grades 9-12 form of the Primary Mental Abilities test. (Editor)

One hundred sixty sibling pairs from two child families were sampled for sibling interaction behaviors as they relate to measures of categorization style. The study provides additional evidence of the importance of a child's siblings to his cognitive development. (Editor/RK)

Examined methodological issues related to the detection and evaluation of behavioral toxicity in infants and children, focusing on the selection of appropriate variables and strategies to control for confounding, sampling strategies and the problem of "overcontrol" for confounding; and the evaluation of dose-response relations and…